The Heritage Foundation is speedrunning the collapse of the postwar (WWII) global order, with intention. They posted their plans in plain sight. Nobody with the power to stop them lifted a finger.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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https://aeon.co/essays/why-western-democracy-is-ailing-and-how-to-fix-it
We entered this era of an unjust social order, political malaise and destabilisation almost half a century ago when the US president Ronald Reagan and the UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher introduced libertarian reforms that were embraced globally.
At his first cabinet meeting as president in 1981, Reagan distributed copies of Mandate for Leadership, whose 3,000 pages came out of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, DC. This became the ideology of neoliberalism, which advocated a smaller state, industry deregulation, tax cuts, strengthened defence, and roll-back of social engineering. A year later, 60 per cent of the Mandate’s proposals had been adopted by the Reagan administration,
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The decline began with Reagan, and accelerated with 9/11.
That's a funny way to spell Nixon
I disagree. The Nixon government was awful, but so were many governments before. It wasn't a decline per se, it was just part of the constant change (both good and bad) in leadership.
The real decline began when corporatism started to take over the political/legal system, which was mainly a Reagan phenomenon. Large businesses started pulling everything towards their shareholders, nothing for the workers. Syndicates lost power. The political system started being bought by the corporations. Whole laws started being bought by the corporations.
While corruption has always existed, previously it was something to hide, to be ashamed of. But with the corporate takeover of the USA it gradually began to be normalized, and now it's almost expected from any relevant figure.
Corporatism has had a hold on the political and legal system in the US since the beginning, just to varying degrees. Shareholder primacy gained a foothold in the 30s and 40s alongside the decay of antitrust law. Prior to that, the Lochner era of cases defined the era of corporate control. The late 1800s had robber barons and oil and railroad tycoons killing people with private police forces. Slave plantations and the vestiges controlled the South, and with it the rest of the country, since the 3/5ths compromise and before. We are just in a new form today with tech companies controlling everything, including the public forum, while SCOTUS green lights everything in favor of corporations, conservatives, and the wealthy, and Congress is absolutely deadlocked. It is definitely a far side of the pendulum swing, and it might be the one we can't realistically swing back from any time soon, but it is well within the political and legal themes of the US historically.
Check out the Powel Memorandum. From the 70s moneyed interests started to systematically shift power to the wealthy and large corporations. They created think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to give the project the veneer of scientific legitimation. Reagan was the first to accept a policy blue print from Heritage. Since then they have been working to stack the courts, form government policy and legislate a shift if money and power to the few. Trump is reaping the benefits of what has been prepared since Reagan. Trickle down economy was one of the greatest scams of all time.
I mean it’s good that it’s ended, but the way it’s ending is far worse than most ways it could’ve.
I think an end in this way was foreseeable. I think a segment of the left, particularly the authoritarian left, had a naïve notion that the end of the US empire would inevitability result in some form of class awareness instead of just nostalgic fascism and evangelical millenarianism.
We'll need each other more than ever in the death throes.
Also that the Pax Americana was just propaganda. The war in Ukraine is pretty obvious. However the conflicts in the Sahel have also gotten a lot worse since the US has mostly withdrawn itself from that region. Sudan is especially bad(chemical warfare, mass starvation and so forth). The Congo conflict is also flaring up again.
I would not be surprised if things get a lot worse in the near future.
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i think the 'authleft' (at this point the political compass as a phenomenon should be a gen-ed 3 credit-hour class btw) was mostly gen x and millennial doomers with a lapsed DSA membership who thought if America didn't decline we'd start a nuclear war. you experienced the optimistic slice of the terminally online slice who were fans of pretending to have read theory and then arguing with anarchists, please keep in mind that every group of terminally online people you are tempted to generalize should be treated as about 1% of their representative population, assuming posting on social media is their only hobby.
no matter what set of ideological clothes you put on, the fall of America and rise of China was clear to anyone with open eyes as early as Obama and to schizos as early as Tienanmen square
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Yeah… there was a graceful and positive way for this to occur at one point, but definitely not anymore, I think. The last couple years have been less “ripping the bandaid off” and more “stabbing oneself in the neck”.
I know there will be some real benefits in a handful of contexts and regions, but overall, I shudder to imagine the implications of this rapid and violent abrogation and dismantling of Pax Americana.
That’s not to say that I’m expressing “wooooo ‘MURICUH”, or pining for days of Cold War yore when we fucked around with fomenting coups in tons of countries - nothing of the sort, in fact. Simply pointing out that nobody fully comprehends what all the fallout from this tectonic geopolitical shift will ultimately encompass. The American global security/enforcement apparatus has underpinned the vast majority of the geopolitical and global economic context and (relative) stability since the end of WW2, and even moreso since the end of the Cold War, and now that we’re… uh… not doing that anymore… this is completely new territory. We are in the geopolitical Wild West now. It’s arguably too broad of a generalization to say “all bets are off”… but a lot of them actually are, in a meaningful sense.
Not over but ending. That will take years.
I had to downvote due to the paywall.
President Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own.
True, he had plenty of help from his cronies and the billionaires. You might think that doesn't make any sense, but billionaires are going for WORLD dominance, they want EVERYONE under their thumb, including the U.S. Especially the U.S.
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I can't believe the person who failed at everything is failing the USA. It's crazy /s
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